Just Before I Died

Warren House Inn

Monday lunchtime

Lyla is at school and I should be at work in Princetown. Instead I’m parked down the road at Warren House Inn. The fog is so thick I can barely see the humble old whitewashed building, though it is only a hundred yards away. Normally the inn is visible for miles around – because it is the only building for miles in the rolling, bony moorland. Today, in the Dartmoor murk, Warren House looks like the vague, gloomy idea of a cottage, half-formed in someone’s mind.

Stepping out, locking the car door, I pause and stare at my own hand, unnerved. I never used to do this. Locking my car, in one of the wildest places on the moor. We never lock anything on the moor: bikes, cars, houses. And who’s going to steal my worthless old Ford? A team of stoats?

One of the shaggy Dartmoor bullocks?

Or the sheep?

I can hear sheep, somewhere around me, also invisible in the fog:

meh, meh meh meh meh, as if they are mocking me.

MEH, Kath Redway, MEH.

It was Lyla who first suggested this to me, that sheep say meh not baa, and once she’d said it I couldn’t get it out of my head; because she was right. Sheep are laughing at us, mocking; meh meh meh, look at you, what are you doing here, look at this person locking her car door, meh, why is she locking it, mehh, is she scared she might get back in and drive into a reservoir?

Mehhhhhhhhhh!

Thoughts press in on me: I am stuck inside myself. How could I possibly have tried to kill myself? What did I do on that fateful December day? I do not believe it; yet I have to believe it.

As I walk up the mist-swirled moorland road towards the inn, I go over it for the seventeenth time this morning. Yesterday I thought it through two hundred times or more. I’ve been obsessing like this since Tessa’s visit.

I remember Christmas, I do remember that. It was nice. We did what we always do, went down to Salcombe like the poor relatives we are, and feasted at my brother’s expense.

We had a roasted goose, like they eat in Dickens. And Lyla actually got to play with other kids, her rambunctious eight- and ten-year-old cousins, Oscar and Charlie – or Foxtrot and Tango, as Dan calls them. Charlie and Oscar tolerate Lyla because they’ve grown up with her: when she twirls her hands repeatedly or gets phobic about scratchy things or hides shyly under a table with an encyclopaedia, they accept it, and laugh good-naturedly, and that makes Lyla smile and come out from under the table and play with them in her own awkward, funny way, and that’s why I like Christmas. Lyla is always happy at Christmas.

And I enjoyed Christmas this year, too. I remember crackers and sloe gin, and luxury chocolate assortments my brother bought from some posh London shop, and then a fat, contented drive home to Huckerby on Boxing Day – and that evening Adam went away for a week, to do up the rangers’ hut on the northern moors, leaving me alone with Lyla.

And after that, the horrible fog comes down on everything, like a door closing, and everything is lost in the remorseless mist of my post-traumatic, retrograde amnesia, the vapours of my bruised and useless brain.

From Boxing Day onwards my mind is basically a void. Four days later I tried to kill myself, and I have no idea why.

Meh.

As I get nearer the pub, I see the door is shut and the windows are dark. It looks as if the pub is closed. The peat fire in this pub has, famously, never gone out since 1847. But sometimes they casually close the place in the dead days of winter. But I need this pub to be open: because it is the one place I might find Adam, when I need to find my elusive husband.

It’s not his fault he’s a ranger. But it means he ranges, across a sizeable tract of moor with all its sparkling streams and clapper bridges, its hidden spinneys and forgotten villages. He is always out and about, usually in remote areas with no mobile coverage, so I can’t get hold of him. And right now I want to get a proper hold of him. We’ve spent the days since Tessa’s visit quietly not addressing the massive issue: pretending that this enormous thing isn’t there, didn’t happen. Let’s have some more tea and say nothing. I know Adam is resentful but he keeps it pretty much hidden.

This morning my mood changed. I dropped Lyla at school, went back to the office at Princetown, opened my computer and typed in some words: The first recorded instance of the word ‘swaling’ comes from a thirteenth-century poem. It means the spectacular, controversial winter burning of Dartmoor’s stubborn gorse and bracken, and can still be witnessed every winter, on the higher moors … And then I stopped writing and looked at my stupid words, so irrelevant to the gaping void in my life, the open wound in everything, about to be infected. So I decided I had to leave the office and talk to my husband: immediately. And I made my excuses and headed out here.

Enough tea; enough denial. Enough imaginary men in woods.

I need the facts.

Turning the rusty handle of the knackered wooden door, I step through. The pub is open, but almost empty. There are a few local drinkers with drams and pints at one end; a huge grey wolfhound snoozes by the undying fire at the other.

I suspect this story about the eternal Warren House fire is a lie, told for tourists, but we all tell lies, to get by. And why not? I wish I had more lies, to tell myself. I would happily lie to myself for the rest of life if I could: I didn’t really try to commit suicide, no: I was trying to explore the reservoir. I was trying to see if my car would float. I was in a parallel universe at the time. I never tried to kill myself and leave my daughter alone, meh meh meh meh meh. I feel like crying again.

‘Hello, Katarina.’

A friendly face: Ron, behind the bar. He’s owned this pub for decades, possibly centuries: I wonder if he kindled the hearth fire in 1847. He certainly knew my mum, who loved this poetic little pub with its ghosts and legends and mummified cats buried in the walls, and the stones of the Iron Age village visible from the saloon bar windows. He knew she called me Katarina, and he knows that I shortened it to Kath because I felt it was pretentious. So he teases me.

‘Hey, Ron. Call me Kath?’

‘Nah,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t feel right. What would your mum think?’

We’ve probably had this conversation six hundred times. It is comfort food for my soul, right now.

‘How are you, Kat? I heard about the accident.’

‘Oh, OK. Recovering. Wouldn’t mind the odd holiday in the Maldives, you know.’

He ponders. ‘Isn’t that the place that’s, like, sinking underwater?’

‘Bit like Dartmoor in January, then.’

He chuckles, and turns to serve another customer, lifting a glass to the optic, draining a shot of Gordon’s. I look at him as he works, his weatherbeaten, grog-blossomed face. He probably kissed me as a baby, when I was called Katarina Olivia Mirabel Kinnersley, not Kath Redway.

I am shortened. Abbreviated. Truncated. I have fallen off a social cliff. And I don’t mind. Because all I wanted was an ordinary life, with ordinary happiness, and my ordinary and handsome husband and my extraordinary and beautiful daughter, and the happy dogs and the ancient house, and yet I tried to throw it all away? To damn them to a kind of hell, without me?

I must not crack. I must keep a grip.

I wonder if Ron knows the truth about my ‘accident’. I wonder how many people know that it was actually a suicide bid. I don’t think it appeared in papers, I suspect the local police did Adam a favour, a Dartmoor favour for Dartmoor people. Because Adam is popular, the handsome Chagford boy, one of the Redways, a National Park Ranger, and the moorland people are so tight-knit.

And I am not quite one of them. I’m a well-spoken girl from the coast, with connections on the moor, and I’m always very welcome – but I’m not quite one of them. And never will be.

‘So, Kat, love, what can I get you?’

‘The usual.’

He chuckles. ‘Your husband? I’m not sure if he’s been by today, I was out this morning.’

We nod at each other. Ron leans over the bar, and calls out to one of the drinkers at the distant tables, a farmer I’m guessing by his muddy boots. He’s drinking on his own. I think I recognize him: yet another cousin of Adam’s. He has so many: so many with the very same dark hair, striking eyes and rakish, slanted cheekbones, the looks inherited by Lyla. This particular handsome cousin is on Adam’s aunt’s side, his dad’s sister. And I’m not sure he and Adam get on.

‘Jack, you seen yer cuz?’

Jack nods as he drinks his beer. ‘Adam? Yeah. By an hour back. He’s up at Vitifer, I think, some sheep in a wire.’

Ron turns to me with an expressive shrug which says: What do you want to do?

‘How far is Vitifer, where is it?’ I ask.

Ron shakes his head. ‘Half-hour walk, straight across the moors. But you don’t want to do it in this fog, Kath, you’d get lost in five minutes, we’d have the air ambulance out. And that goes on my tax bill.’ He is grinning. I’m not.

‘I really have to see him. It’s really, really important.’

‘C’mon now, Kath, please—’

‘I have to. Please. I have to! HAVE TO.’

I realize, too late, that I am shouting. The wolfhound lifts a lordly muzzle, sniffing the tension amidst the peatsmoke. The pub is silenced: the fire is probably going out. I have caused a scene. I never cause scenes.

For a moment there is deep embarrassment. The silence is shrill. Then someone says, ‘Hey. That’s all right. I’ll take ya.’ It’s Jack, again. He comes across, puts his empty glass on the bar. Grins at me. ‘I’ve got to go that way anyway, gonna see a mate about some feed. Thanks, Ron.’

Ron looks at the two of us, he squints unsurely at Jack, and he shrugs in my direction. ‘You’re more like your mum than I thought, Kath. She loved taking risks.’

Jack grasps me by the arm. Ten minutes later I am jumping from tussock to tussock and squelching through the foggy mire, with Jack at my side, guiding me carefully.

Ron was completely right. I wouldn’t have had a clue where to go in this mist. I’d have wandered off track immediately, got stuck knee-deep in a marsh, fallen head first in a leat, knocked myself out and drowned. Oh look, she tried to kill herself again. And this time she succeeded.

Meh.

Jack tells me he farms sheep, though I knew this already. He tells me all about sheep, as we hike through the fog.

‘You know they say sheep are stupid,’ he says, helping me over a wooden stile. ‘Well they’re right. Only thing sheep is good at is dying. You name it, they get it. Lice, ticks, scabs, big fat worms as long as a toddler’s arm.’ He laughs, his hand firm on my arm, or sometimes, rather too warmly, right around my waist. ‘Foot rot, braxy, tetanus, pulpy kidney, blackleg, lamb dysentery, black disease, pasteurella. And if that isn’t enough, if they haven’t managed to kill themselves eating ragwort, or drowned themselves down at Black-a-Tor, they go and stick their heads in wires. I sometimes think they are naturally suicidal.’

I try not to react. Does he know my story? Is he winding me up? I’m pretty sure Adam doesn’t like Jack Bryant. Some ancient family argument.

That arm strays to my waist again.

Squeezing.

‘Then there’s the devil-worshippers.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah,’ says Jack, steering me over a little clapper bridge. ‘Get a lot of that all over: weird patterns, burned circles, tortured animals. Adam deals with it all the time.’ He pauses, in the mist, looking at me. Smirking. ‘There was this one case, with a foal. Jeez. Did he not tell you?’

‘No.’

‘Guess he doesn’t want to bring it home, scare that little girl of yours, Lyla?’ His grin is very wide, like he finds it all funny. ‘Anyway, yeah. Last autumn he found a foal. Bloody odd, it was surrounded by these patches of charred grass.’ Jack chuckles loudly. ‘He called me and asked me to help. What a job. That poor bastard foal. They’d cut its tongue and eyes out, and cut off its, you know, genitals, cut ’em all off, and sliced off an ear. And there was this weird white paint on one leg, some symbol, a star or pattern.’ Jack is scanning the horizon, though all I can see is fog, then he puts his hand on my hand. ‘And the weirdest thing of all was, they’d dragged the bleeding corpse, when the animal was likely still alive, they’d dragged it round and round in circles and stars, making these crazy patterns of blood in the frost. Demon symbols, I heard. Strangest thing I ever saw. Sent a fucking shiver right down me. Happened over near your place, Pete Bickle’s farm. Not far from Hobbyjob’s and Huckerby. Which I thought was kinda funny, cos your mum would have loved the spookiness, if you see what I mean.’

‘What?’

I gaze at him. Those blue eyes so like Adam’s, but colder still. ‘My mum? You knew my mum?’

‘Sure I knew your mum, Kat, way back, when we were all kids, all of us cousins, lads in Chagford. And she was all into that pagan stuff, wasn’t she? You do know that? I don’t mean she tortured animals, nothing like that.’ He laughs. ‘All I mean is that she was into those symbols. Spells. Spirits, spooks, deadly nightshade, wacky mushrooms, whatever. Dancing naked around stones: all stuff they used to do on the moors back in the day, all the hippies from Totnes. Amazing she didn’t die of flu, your mum, amount of time she was starkers up the tors. They did like a party.’ He stops abruptly. As if he is teasing me.

‘There’s Adam.’ He pauses. ‘At least, I think it’s Adam. This mist is a right fucking job.’

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